Whoa seriously? I never played the game, so when she said “I know Shale isn’t a guy”, I assumed that meant “I know he isn’t human”. …I mean tons of other guys in this comic aren’t either, but I took it to mean “I know he’s not a fleshy meatbag.”

That’s too harsh. Mind you, he definately doesn’t qualify in the same category of man as Sten or Kratos, but they’re not really men. More like personifications of violence and fury. Alistair has emotions, so he’s not a ‘manly man’.

I didn’t feel like Sten was a personifacation of anything, he seemed like a well rounded character for a hardened military authority brought up in a society with strict old-world values. He had that naivete when he said things that came across as racist or sexist that he honestly wasn’t trying to be provocative, things in Ferelden were just so wildly outside of his realm of understanding that he had to question them. Like a militant islamic borg variant of Hank Hill.

That said, I did find Alistair kind of irritating and left him at the camp most of the time. He felt kind of like he belonged more in a Harlequin romance fantasy than on my smashy brawler team.

I never used Sten for at least two particular reasons:
One was that he made statements with absolute certainty that were absolutely wrong. He did this frequently, and it was often annoying. The whole “women can’t be warriors” one tended to wind me up the most since I mostly play female characters. Made me wish there was an option to beat him down and carve “QED” into his face in reply.

But worse than that was that if you did the same back to him, he disapproves of it. Wut?!! Turns out that the way to win Sten’s approval is to recite trite emotional crap that I wouldn’t want to say anyway. If, like I did, you try to gain his approval by responding to him as he does to you, it has the opposite effect on him. Bloody hypocrite.

I get the impression the Qunari race wasn’t well fleshed out back in Origins… and they only really got all the real beef of the race fleshed out in time for Dragon Age 2.

Hey wow, it’s nice that you’ve taken it upon yourself to talk about how poorly a character you admittedly didn’t play was handled, because it’s pretty clear this isn’t something you have a lot of first-hand experience with. If you try to pander to Sten he disapproves, the only way to get his loyalty up is to backsass him, choose all the sarcastic options or the ones where you stand up to him and tell him you’re going to do what you want regardless of what he thinks. There’s one part where the conversation path that leads to the maximum approval gain is to reject his opinions until you goad him into a fight, and then defeat him to earn his respect.

If you actually, you know, played the game with him instead of writing angry fanfiction, you’d have seen them peel back a couple layers of Qunari society and realize that the “women can’t be warriors” things is an ingrained prejudice (that you’re supposed to confront him on) he cultivated in a society where men do all of the manual labour and women focus on administraion, education, and spirituality. If you read up on Qunari society, it’s pretty nearly a matriarchal society, with women determining everything from who breeds with each other to what job everyone will do. They just aren’t warriors. Sten being baffled by the idea of female warriors is his own ignorance, DA:O worldbuilding, and a pretty nifty piece of character development.

Honestly, I hated the Qunari for a whole lot of reasons in DA2, but mostly because they cast aside all of the worldbuilding they did in DA:O regarding the Qunari’s regimented society and superior scientific advancement to turn them into the “primitive” demon people. They just kind of wiped the slate and threw in a bunch of Warcraft Draenei Disney gargoyles and called it a day.

I agree. Everyone thinks that those outfits are gay, even Swedes. Eurovison is less gay than those matador outfits. EUROVISION! Because at least that competition isn’t taken seriously (and everyone wants it to be as camp as possible).